CRIME FIGHTER GETS 3 YEARS

EDMUND H. MAHONY; Courant Staff WriterTHE HARTFORD COURANT

The larger-than-life career of former New Haven police Lt. William "Billy" White came to a stunning conclusion Monday when the high-profile lawman was sentenced to more than three years in prison for taking tens of thousands of dollars in bribes and stealing thousands more that he thought belonged to drug dealers.

Over more than five years, federal prosecutors said, White, 64, collected as much as $50,000 in bribes from a bail-bond company for providing the bail bondsmen with inside information and for tracking down the company's absconders, something the city was paying him to do. In addition, during an elaborate FBI sting beginning in 2006, White stole nearly $30,000 in federal money planted secretly by agents.

It was an unusually quiet, emotionally draining and improbable sentencing hearing for one of the most decorated police detectives in the state, one who came to personify the massive law enforcement effort against the drug-dealing gangs that were turning Connecticut's big cities into battle zones in the 1990s.

Scores of friends and relatives packed one of the state's smallest courtrooms as U.S. District Judge Janet Bond Arterton weighed White's long history of exemplary police work and charitable work against the revelation, she said, that he was "on the take." The support for White inside the courthouse was overwhelming compared to the disapproval outside, where four sodden protesters stood in the pouring rain shouting "Billy White must go."

White made a brief and composed apology just seconds before Arterton imposed sentence on the one charge of bribery and two of theft to which White pleaded guilty after reaching an agreement with prosecutors in October.

"I just hope everybody, some way, some how, deep down in their hearts, can forgive me for what I have done," he said.

Arterton sentenced White to 38 months in prison. She said she would have given him 46 months, the maximum recommended by the guidelines applicable in the case, had it not been for the decades of work he has done raising money for charities and helping inner-city youngsters.

The judge also fined White $20,000 and ordered him to forfeit $10,200. White has already repaid the $15,505 in planted FBI money that he stole.

During a long address, Arterton reflected on White's inherent contradiction. She referred to dozens of letters from supporters who praised him for good works that ran from raising money for a terminally ill child to paying for Thanksgiving turkeys for down-on-their-luck city families.

New Haven teacher Gloria Rodriguez told Arterton about a student who wrote in a college application essay that White had saved him from a life of crime. But always, Arterton said, the good bumped against corruption and breach of the public trust.

"And that is where the waters divide," Arterton said. "And that of course is the tension for imposing a sentence on a person who is, as we might describe, a good Billy and a bad Billy. These are serous crimes and the important thing is they are serious because of who committed them. The bottom line is he was caught on the take. He stole and he sold information."

When at the top of his law enforcement game, the pony-tailed White seemed to be an omnipresent police force, crashing around after killers and gangsters in a battered undercover police car. During 39 years on the force, he cultivated the image of knowing everything and being everywhere. He would park in no-parking zones to have meetings in places that serve organic coffee. If cars belonging to Mafia soldiers were blowing up, White could be depended upon to know who was doing it and why.

He was New Haven's top narcotics detective in the 1990s and collected much of the evidence that a federal anti-crime task force used to crush the New Haven and Bridgeport drug crews whose inner-city sales were resulting in record body counts. Hubert Santos, White's lawyer, said that during the height of the gang violence, White slept in his clothes because he was called out at night so often.

"He basically saved segments of New Haven through his work 24/7," Santos said.

Tragically, in 1994, one of White's sons, 22-year old Tyler White, was an innocent victim of one of the gang shootings White was working to end. In legal papers filed in the case, Santos said Tyler White was shot dead by Bridgeport gangsters who were afraid he saw them commit a violent crime. White became a stone-faced spectator at the subsequent trial of those accused in his son's death.

Santos argued in court Monday that White should have been given leniency because his bribery and thefts were the result of untreated post-traumatic stress disorder he suffered following his son's death.

But Acting U.S. Attorney Nora Dannehy said the death, although tragic, was not enough to account for White's illegal behavior. During the period be was supposed to have been suffering from traumatic stress, he was continuing to collect boxes of commendations for exemplary law enforcement work. Arterton agreed.

White was arrested in March 2007. He was scheduled to retire the following June.